This book argued that episodes of anti-neoliberal contention in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, were Polanyian backlashes to the construction of contemporary market society. First- and second-generation neoliberal reforms recommodified labor and land by dismantling the national-populist order and by restructuring the state in support of market efficiency to the exclusion of other values. Free-market policies severed the connections of organized subaltern social groups to the state, leaving them to fend for themselves against capital in the market. The process of recommodification swept aside the mixed economy and brought domestic prices, regulatory environments, and practices in line with the world economy.

Urban popular sectors, peasants, the indigenous, and some middle-class groups – especially those dependent on state employment – experienced this process as economic, political, and social exclusion and injustice. Herein lay the motivation for anti-neoliberal mobilization. The all-encompassing, society-wide nature of the neoliberal project – an effort to reconstruct contemporary market society – helped to link a wide variety of grievances. Although many groups limited protest to policies that specifically affected them, and often in a localized manner, the fact that so many neoliberal reforms were enacted simultaneously (or in compressed time frames) helped bring protest streams together. Furthermore, some reforms, such as stabilization policy, affected everyone, which is why reduction or elimination of subsidies caused such huge displays of public outrage.